woke screaming, a sound that tore through the morning air and drowned out the roosters' calls. The nightmare's terror—the bloated, lurching creature, its glowing green blood, the way it split and reformed into that sickly, corrosive mist—had long been a recurring shadow in his mind. But for so long he had gone through the motions, treating it as routine, a monster to grind down night after night. Until now, when the memory surged back, raw and unbidden, it left him shivering.
Sunlight spilled softly through the window, golden and almost gentle. His sheets were twisted around his legs, soaked with cold sweat. His shoulder—torn open in the nightmare—was whole.
His body was intact.
His mind was not.
He dragged a trembling hand down his face, forcing his breathing to slow. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. He swallowed the tremor clinging to each exhale. For a long moment, he simply sat on the edge of the bed, because standing felt too much.
Eventually, he forced himself upright. He needed to center himself. Not to repair the damage—the nightmares didn't leave scars there—but to stop his thoughts from fracturing further. Meditation wouldn't undo the fear, but it could prevent it from consuming him entirely.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, hands resting lightly on his knees, letting the body's tension seep into the floorboards. He focused on the mind, on the brief quiet it offered after the unrelenting chaos of the past few days: the Ebon Shade, the collapsing temple, the endless swirl of nightmares, and the creeping sense that something far larger than him waited somewhere just beyond the edge of perception.
He replayed the fight in his mind: the surge of adrenaline, the dagger sinking into the creature's chest, the exhilaration of striking a blow, the sickly green blood. Each replay was precise, each strike cataloged, each misstep noted for correction.
And then—unbeknownst to him—his chest began to glow. A pale, wavering light, silver and gold, rising gradually, shining through the taut sinews of his skin, unnoticed in his trance. The glow was faint at first, a heartbeat of light, but it grew brighter, radiating from him with every measured breath, until the space around him seemed to pulse with the beginning of something greater.
Then the chains came.
It began subtly—a tug at his chest, almost like a heartbeat pressing outward, gentle but insistent. He froze, sensing their presence but seeing nothing. The tug grew stronger, encircling his wrists, his shoulders, his torso. Strands of light-gold, silver, and shadow wrapped around him, solid yet flowing, biting yet warm.
"No—" he whispered, voice distant in his own ears. "Stop—let go—"
The chains ignored him.
He twisted, yanked, tried to break free. They only tightened, curling like living things around him. He swung his dagger through them, slashing with all his strength—but it cut nothing. Smoke and light yielded nothing, the chains neither shredded nor faltered.
They pulled him.
First upward, then downward, the room dissolving around him as walls melted and floor fell away. Panic gnawed at him, but he forced it down. He clenched his teeth, resisting the instinct to scream. Not yet. He pushed with every ounce of strength he had, digging his heels into the invisible ground, but the inevitability of the pull was absolute.
And then he fell.
Not downward, not really—there was no true direction, only motion. Darkness pressed from every side, collapsing inwards like the weight of a dying universe. The chains dragged him through layers of reality he could not comprehend, and his mind teetered on the edge of sanity.
He glimpsed fragments of impossible worlds:
—Fields of fractured halos scattered like broken bones.
—A sun split open, leaking molten gold into a void of black.
—Cities turned inside out, abandoned by shadows that seemed to walk themselves.
All of it collided with him at once.
The fall ended.
Riel hit the ground hard, the impact forcing every breath from his lungs. For a moment, he lay dazed, staring at the cracked, writhing darkness beneath his cheek.
The ground pulsed. Slowly. Like a heartbeat. Black and red veins ran beneath the surface, faintly glowing. The soil exhaled with life—or some grotesque imitation of it.
"What… what is this?" he whispered. "Where… am I?"
He forced himself upright. His legs shook, breath uneven, every movement heavy.
Above him, the sky was no sky at all. A single dying sun bled through thick ash clouds, its molten surface cracking, leaking light that fell like scalding rain. The air reeked of burned stone and old, congealed blood. A wind moved over him, carrying whispers in a language his mind could not parse.
"This is… the Umbral Reaches," he said, voice trembling. The realization clawed at him. The third realm. The lowest. A place where only the most talented second-sphere Ascendants, or the rare prodigies, ever tread. Mortals awakened their souls in the mortal realms, strengthened them in the Veil, and only at the third sphere ventured here—but even then, awakening did not occur in this place. Not here.
He shouldn't be here.
Not now.
"Why…?" His voice cracked. "How…?"
The air did not answer. The dying sun flickered. The glow in his chest—the residual shimmer from his meditation—faded, leaving him alone in a world not meant to be traversed by someone like him.
He took a slow step forward. The living soil squelched faintly beneath his boots, its red pulses dimming at his touch. A shiver ran down his spine.
The Umbral Reaches were alive. Not with civilization, but with something older, crueler, elemental. Here were the things sealed away, or worse, the things never meant to see light at all.
Riel scanned the horizon. Spires of blackened rock clawed at the sky, jagged and broken, defying logic. Shadows writhed between them like rivers of ink, moving with some alien purpose. The wind carried low murmurs, mocking, ancient, scraping at his mind. Every step he took seemed to awaken the terrain, the ground shifting beneath his weight, sensing him.
And then he saw it.
A shape.
Impossible. Unfathomable. Something that should not exist in any reality he had known. It moved slowly, deliberately, across the horizon. Its bulk was immense—too vast for his mind to quantify. Limbs—or structures like limbs—twisted in ways that broke anatomy and sanity alike. Spines, ridges, molten shadows pulsed across its body, shifting as though alive. The very earth seemed to bend around it.
Primal fear slammed into him—not the measured dread of nightmares, but the raw, instinctive terror of being infinitesimal. He was an ant beneath its gaze, a mote of dust in a storm it could snuff out with a breath. If it saw him… he would be gone.
Riel dropped to the ground. Pressed himself into the uneven soil. Muscles coiled, breathing shallow, every nerve taut. He shrank as best he could, curling into the cracks and fissures of the black-red terrain. Flattening himself, hoping to become nothing, invisible.
The creature paused. One glint—or what might have been an eye—flickered, molten and unblinking. The world seemed to warp around it, reality bending to accommodate its form. Riel's chest tightened, every instinct screaming to run, but he could not risk movement.
He pressed lower. Smaller. Hoping that invisibility might save him, that stillness could pass for absence.
And then, it moved on. Slowly. Deliberately. Folding into shadows, merging with jagged spires. Riel did not move. Not until the world had gone utterly still.
Even then, when he lifted his head, the horizon felt alive. Watching. Whispering. The land itself seemed aware of his presence, a predator noticing the smallest twitch in prey.
Riel sank back to the ground, tears slipping silently down his face. His body shook uncontrollably. He was scared. Terrified beyond reason. Here, in the Umbral Reaches, he was insignificant. Fragile. And alone.